Barack Obama defends policies in TV interview blitz

Barack Obama has given morning interviews to five TV channels in a media blitz. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

The US president, Barack Obama, yesterday gave interviews to five TV channels in an unprecedented morning media blitz.

Facing a perfect storm of a week amid foreign policy challenges and the unresolved issue of domestic healthcare reforms, Obama recorded interviews with CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC and the Spanish-language network Univision during a marathon session in the White House's Roosevelt room.

The charm offensive will continue tonight when Obama appears on the David Letterman show, his first such appearance as president.

It caused the Republican senator Lindsey Graham to quip that the only channel Obama had not appeared on was the Food Channel.

The only major network he snubbed was Rupert Murdoch's conservative-leaning Fox News. Earlier this year, he accused it of being "entirely devoted to attacking my administration", prompting one Fox host to describe the Obama White House as "a bunch of crybabies".

The volley of interviews was so unusual that it came with a set of tightly-choreographed rules – they were all to last 15 minutes each, with no live feeds.

Speaking about healthcare, Obama said he had been "humbled" by the struggle to win support for his health policies.

Comparing himself to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, he told interviewers every president pushing for radical changes faced "rambunctious" opposition and rejected suggestions by the former president Jimmy Carter that his critics were motivated by racism.

"Are there people out there who don't like me because of race? I'm sure there are," he said.

"But that's not the overriding issue here. I think there are people who are anti-government. The things that were said about FDR [Roosevelt] were pretty similar to the things that were said about me – he was a communist, he was a socialist."

On foreign affairs, Obama said the military campaign in Afghanistan had succumbed to "mission creep" at the tail end of the Bush years, and that a strategic review would take place before any commitment of further US troops.

The president also revealed that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, had appeared "pretty healthy and in control" during a meeting with Bill Clinton last month. "There's no doubt this is somebody who, I think for a while, people thought was slipping away," he said. "He's reasserted himself."

Obama has not finished reasserting himself, as Letterman's audience will discover.

But live television is a different beast to closely managed interviews, as the president found during his March appearance on the Jay Leno show, which was notable for his gaffe about the "special Olympics".

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